Developments in technology over the last twenty years have had a profound impact on music, particularly popular music, and how it is produced, marketed, distributed, and consumed. The trend is towards Web-based digital formats, such as MPEG-3 acquired from such Web sites as Apple iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, etc., and away from traditional brick and mortar record stores. In the process, the human element of the music store staff, knowledgeable guides to help locate and recommend music, has been lost. A further effect of the move to digital, Web-based downloads is that the packaging of a work of music, with cover art, liner notes, lyric sheets, etc. has also been largely lost. The individual components (songs) of a given collection might even be obscured.
Social networking Web sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter and the phenomenon of Web logging (blogs) further set the stage for network-based communities related by common interests. However, no such site exists which brings together the elements of music culture required to preserve and navigate its rich history and diverse character effectively.
There is great value for learning and for growing communities by connecting those individuals having specific interests to experts in the field, as well as to each other. This principle is evidenced by traditional museums and by social networking sites for the expression of subjective tastes and opinions and by group collaboration sites, such as Wikipedia, producing significant bodies of objective knowledge. It has not however been applied to the general navigation, discovery, and sharing of music and music history and culture through communities of common interests seeded and led by expert curatorship.
Rather than contribute to the dissipation and loss of music culture, technology should be used to preserve and enrich it. A large body of recorded music exists since the invention of the phonograph. Collections of music recordings, photographs, videos, personal accounts, artifacts, memorable, etc. exist in private, public, and commercial hands. While many music download sites exist, and manufactures of portable music storage and playback devices, such as the iPod, provide various services to describe, search, recommend, and catalog music, there is no such service or methodology that provides a comprehensive facility to capture, preserve, and navigate the rich body of materials which exist. To do so requires that the fundamental nature of music phenomenon be understood and its essential underlying relationships be employed to create an intuitive user interface for its navigation with optimized data system architecture for its storage and retrieval.
The commercial music industry has been adversely affected by the World Wide Web. Challenges to conventional sales and marketing of recorded music exist in the areas of copyright protection and distribution that the industry is still coping with. An apparatus to make the substantial catalogs of music and related materials, such as interviews, artifacts, video clips, etc. possessed by various institutions available for general discovery and potential sale by an integrated, guided musical navigation system which address licensing concerns provides a much needed outlet for both the music materials and the persons and institutions owning them.
There is a fundamental relationship between works of music and the artists that create them, and the time, location, genre, and cultural climate in which they are conceived and produced. These elements provide the best possible classification and search criteria for creating a comprehensive apparatus for the cataloging, search, and discovery of music, its history, and the culture that inspired it. No such facility, service, or apparatus today exists which applies this principle of organization.